Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The Democratic left rallied around the party’s nominee but are now warily surveying his picks for top administration positions
Joe Biden has long had a rollercoaster relationship with progressive organizations and the left wing of the Democratic party and there are signs that the relationship is again starting to fray now that his electoral triumph over Donald Trump is receding into the rear-view mirror.
When Biden entered the Democratic primary field progressive groups were quick to criticize the former vice-president for supporting the Iraq war and previously considering cuts to social security. The organizations cast Biden as an establishment Democrat who would fail to challenge a status quo that had created the conditions for the rise of Trump.
Those suffering from Havana syndrome, as the condition has become known, have complained of headaches, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision and other ailments.
Sick people in northern France occasionally leave garments in healing trees or “arbres à loques” in the hope of a cure, following a tradition that persists since pre-Roman times.
But recently, this tradition has been updated for the coronavirus age.
Donald Trump says his lawyer Rudy Giuliani has tested positive for coronavirus.
.@RudyGiuliani, by far the greatest mayor in the history of NYC, and who has been working tirelessly exposing the most corrupt election (by far!) in the history of the USA, has tested positive for the China Virus. Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!!!
Prince Faisal bin Farhan warns kingdom and its regional allies’ involvement is only way to achieve ‘sustainable’ outcome
Saudi Arabia says the Gulf states must be consulted if a US nuclear agreement with Iran is revived, warning it is the only path towards a sustainable agreement.
President-elect Joe Biden has signalled he will return the US to a nuclear accord with Iran and that he still backed the 2015 deal negotiated under Barack Obama, from which Donald Trump withdrew.
President falsely claims he was ‘cheated’ and calls for people to vote in coming Senate races that will decide control of chamber
Donald Trump has held his first political rally since losing the presidential election, delivering an incoherent speech laced with baseless conspiracies theories about election fraud and attacks on Republican state officials in Georgia who have refused to help him subvert the results.
In front of a crowd of thousands of mostly maskless, non-socially distanced supporters in south Georgia, Trump repeatedly claimed, falsely, that he had won the presidential election, and called for those in government with “courage and wisdom” to help him reverse the result.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dynetics also in competition
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin will take the first woman to the moon, the billionaire said as Nasa nears a decision over who will supply its first privately built lunar landers, meant to be capable of sending astronauts to the moon by 2024.
Firefighters in New York battled a large blaze in the early hours of Saturday morning that gutted a historic church in lower Manhattan. The Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village caught fire before dawn after a blaze spread from an adjacent five-storey vacant building about 5am. Video posted on Twitter showed flames shooting from the roof and the church’s stately front window glowing from the conflagration inside. The church houses New York’s Liberty Bell and its congregation dates from the earliest days of the city’s settlement.
Donald Trump will return to the campaign trail on Saturday – not, notionally at least, in his quixotic and doomed attempt to deny defeat by Joe Biden, but in support of two Republicans who face January run-offs which will decide control of the US Senate.
More than 14m cases recorded with 2,607 deaths on Friday
More lockdowns in California as Arizona and Idaho reel
As US states faced a deadline to place orders for a coronavirus vaccine, California went back into lockdown and federal authorities advised the wearing of masks indoors, new infections reached a record 227,885 on Friday.
For many following the story of the monolith, crucial questions remain unanswered: who made it? What was it for?
In a year of uncertainty and peril, one three-sided mystery metal structure provided a glinting moment of distraction, or even hope – and then it was gone.
Before the public had moved on from the monolith, the monolith had moved on from us.
President no closer to overturning result, with just one small victory in a month’s worth of cases
For a man obsessed with winning, Donald Trump is losing a lot.
In the month since the election, the president and his legal team have come no closer in their frantic efforts to overturn the result, notching up dozens of losses in courts across the country, with more rolling in by the day.
Nearly all of 700 troops will leave over next few months follow president’s latest order with short notice
The US will pull out nearly all its estimated 700 troops in Somalia over the next few months, the latest in a series of short-notice withdrawals ordered by Donald Trump in his last few weeks in power.
A Pentagon statement on Friday said that some of the troops would be repositioned in neighbouring countries while others – it did not say how many – would leave the region altogether.
More than 1,500 researchers also sign letter after Black expert on ethics says Google tried to suppress her research on bias
More than 1,200 Google employees and more than 1,500 academic researchers are speaking out in protest after a prominent Black scientist studying the ethics of artificial intelligence said she was fired by Google after the company attempted to suppress her research and she criticized its diversity efforts.
Timnit Gebru, who was the technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that she had been fired after sending an email to an internal group for women and allies working in the company’s AI unit.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) in the UK has not had a round of applause from anyone other than the UK’s politicians and the vaccine companies. It gave temporary authorisation to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on Wednesday and within hours, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) put out a stiff statement implying more work was needed than the UK regulator had done. Its own decision could come as late as 29 December. It may well have been needled by the crowing of the health secretary, Matt Hancock, who claimed the fast approval as a Brexit triumph. He had to backtrack. The MHRA’s chief executive, June Raine, pointed out that the agency had simply taken advantage of a provision that any country in Europe could use, to fast-track approval in a pandemic.
Congresswoman says price was appropriate because garment was made by unionised workers in America – unlike ‘Trump’s merch’
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a swift response for conservatives criticizing her for selling a “Tax the Rich” sweatshirt for $58. The price was right, the leftwing New York Democrat said, because the campaign merchandise was made by unionised workers in the US rather than in China, unlike political wear sold by, for example, Donald Trump.
A group of young men posted a video of themselves replacing the monolith, which was similar to one discovered in Utah, with a cross
A group of young men claiming to be Christians have posted a video of themselves tearing down a mysterious monolith that had appeared atop a California mountain and replacing it with a cross.
The monolith had been built near the town of Atascadero and sparked huge interest after the appearance of a similar silvery metal-faced monolith that had been discovered in the deserts of Utah.
In the UK saliva tests for Covid-19, which are being introduced for NHS workers as part of the government’s mass testing programme, pick up only 13% of people with low levels of the virus and not 91%, as the official assessment has claimed, according to experts.
Two members of the Royal Statistical Society’s working group looking at the accuracy of Covid tests have questioned the results and the way they have been evaluated.
Revelations of distorted corona virus tallies have caused growing controversy in Greece reports our correspondent Helena Smith in Athens.
Figures released by the government nightly have been slammed for not reflecting the truth after reports of mismanagement by the national public health organisation, EODY.
The need for federal guidance and money for states to deploy vaccines is real and urgent. Here’s a bit more from NBC News, which reports the bulk of planning for how to distribute the vaccine is still not finished nine months into the pandemic.
Yet beyond the guidelines advising states about how to deploy their vaccines — and a large Defense Department operation to deliver them — the Trump administration hasn’t prepared for a major federal role, a lack of planning that is causing significant anxiety among state and local health officials.
The significant checklist of unmet federal responsibilities underscores the challenges ahead for President-elect Joe Biden, who inherits most of the burden for executing a successful nationwide campaign to vaccinate all Americans, potentially without the billions of dollars in additional funding that will be needed.
One of the major sticking points of the relief bill is liability protections, especially for hard-hit long-term care homes. Although long-term care homes represent less than 1% of the US population, residents and staff represent 40% of Covid-19 deaths.
“We cannot sign off on Mitch McConnell’s idea of, like, a blanket liability, which will open up the floodgates to a whole host of bad conduct, putting in danger the American people,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., a Pelosi deputy. “So nothing is agreed upon until everything is agreed upon. But we’re working hard to arrive at a bipartisan agreement.”
New: Capitol Hill is buzzing with fresh optimism about a Covid-19 relief deal.
Party leaders are converging on a price tag and negotiating after months of deadlock.
But some policy disputes linger—primarily on state/local aid and liability protections.https://t.co/mEqQfKK6GL